The Matzo Ball Heiress

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

“We want an average day, not one with ceremony. You look like you might have some interesting things to say—”

  “As opposed to the chicken?” I say.

  The producer smiles. “Brilliant. Keep the chitchat up and you’ll get right into the film. So would you like to tell us your thoughts?”

  My wavy hair is out of control from the humidity that’s been plaguing the city; it’s almost in fright-wig territory. “Please don’t film me. I’m having a bad day. I just want to keep walking.”

  “But we’re from the BBC,” the pretty, redheaded female interviewer cuts in, finished with the chicken. Her accent is the uppitiest of Upper Class, just like the producer’s.

  I shake my head no. “My hair’s too messy to be on air.”

  The interviewer sneers. “A great tragedy like 9/11 occurred and you’re worried about your hair?”

  “Yes,” I hurl back.

  “You’re as indifferent as those barracudas that sell souvenirs down by Ground Zero,” she sniffs.

  “Francesca,” the producer hushes her.

  “And you’re not?” I spit right back at her. Normally I would’ve just walked on, but lucky for Francesca, she cornered a woman who was just duped by an asshole.

  “And how is that?” Francesca says with a start.

  “You make documentaries. I do, too. We try and make a buck or two off other people’s ideas and emotions.”

  The veteran producer can’t help himself. “If you’re so concerned about hair, what did you make a film on—how to shampoo?” He has a good chuckle with Francesca while I gather my thoughts, knife-faced.

  Memories of September 11 flash through my brain. I could say a hundred different things. But what I actually say to the BBC crew is: “I’m damn glad someone’s down there selling souvenirs.”

  “You’re glad?” the talent, Francesca, says after a sharp click of her tongue.

  “Glad. New York is functioning when there’s a buck being made. If we think too much about danger and tragedy we’d never get out of bed. I saw Tower Two explode. But what am I supposed to do with that hideous memory? I just don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay? And by the way, if someone doesn’t want to be on camera whether their mother just died or they are having a bad hair day, I respect their individual right to say no. That’s what a release form is for, mutual consent. Making a film is a privilege, not a badge.”

  Francesca quails at my reproach, turning slightly pink.

  “And p.s.,” I spit out, “the only shampoo in my films were in the shower room at Riker’s Island. I have two News and Documentary Emmys for my frivolity.”

  The producer turns to the main cameraman. “Did you get all that?”

  “No,” he apologizes.

  “I did,” calls camera B.

  The producer touches his anemic face nervously, and turns to me with new determination. “Brilliant. One hundred percent heartfelt. Darling, will you fill out a release form?”

  “In your dreams.”

  “Please—” Francesca begs me with her eyes “—it’s so hard to get real emotion on film. If you make documentaries you understand.”

  “Sorry,” the producer adds. “We all have our methods.”

  Now I get it. They were deliberately trying to provoke a reaction from me. I angrily snatch the paper on the clipboard and the producer hands me a pen. I am their peer after all, and I do know damn well how hard it is to get a release.

  “Greenblotz?” he says when I hand it back to him.

  “Yes.”

  “Like the matzo company?”

  “Yes.”

  The producer looks at me in such a way that I can tell: one more in the tribe. Funny, the producer looks about as Jewish as Christopher Robin. But as my father has always pointed out, there are Jews of all skin tones and eye colors. My blue eyes and my cousin Greg’s blond hair are proof enough. “Didn’t you just give the Food Channel a tour of your factory?” the producer says.

  “Yes,” I say, confused and still cooling down. Do they know about my sordid night with Steve? Does word spread that fast in this town?

  “Jared filmed you,” he says. “We went to film school in London together. He was very impressed with you. Do you know your prison film aired on the BBC?”

  Of course I know that. I’m still sorting through my emotions. “Yes, we had a lot of e-mail from there.”

  “Didn’t Susan Sarandon narrate that?” he asks with a twinkle in his voice.

  “Yes.” I soften. But not much softer: the way my week is going, Jared probably just wants my Emmys to open some doors for him. This time I am a whit wiser. Every time I think I have chemistry I can later chalk it up to schmoozing. I’ve had half a dozen “Let’s be friends” get-togethers from new acquaintances who seemed genuine but then tacked on a “Can you do me a small favor?” at the end of brunch or coffee. Maybe Jared even suggested the live seder to that bastard Steve. “Well, good luck with your film. I’m very late for my appointment.”

  As I rush to Bettina’s, once again the memory of my September 11 washes over my brain in a thousand broken bits.

  I didn’t lose anyone; I never endured that level of pain. But when I turned my head back momentarily, I saw the second tower crumble in the far distance as I fled my office on Twenty-second Street. It’s an image I’ll never forget. Vondra was safely holed up with her sisters in a B&B in Vermont, so there was no one with me with whom I could contemplate the tragedy that had a world in shock.

  Because Manhattan phone lines were overloaded, I was connected to my other friends only by e-mail. The only person I knew who worked at the Trade Center was a friend I’d partied with at the Los Angeles Film Festival; she had won the special critics’ citation for her insider look at her banking firm. On September 11, my festival friend mass e-mailed that she was alive. She had been late to work. Even though her offices were on a low floor and all of her coworkers were accounted for, she was understandably devastated. I sent her an empathetic e-mail saying to call me if she wanted to talk to anyone. Later that day, another e-mail popped up, this time from Dad in Bali.

  R U and your m both OK? I love U both 2 pieces. Jake and Siob? Email/call SOON as U can.

  I e-mailed him back and printed the original message out for Mom as she didn’t know how to use e-mail then. When the NYC phone system was still overloaded at 10:00 a.m., I walked the short distance to her apartment building. I rode up with the elevator operator and a shaken lady who hadn’t heard from her husband yet. I walked down Mom’s hallway like they taught us in a self-defense class required in high school, keys between each knuckle, I grasped down for grit, a warrior. I keyed open my childhood apartment, but Mom wasn’t there. I figured it was best to stay put at her place. I sat in her apartment glued to CNN, occasionally weeping with the rest of America.

  I peeked in Mom’s refrigerator. It was packed with pricey aged beef her cook always buys from Lobel’s, Madison Avenue’s upper-crust butcher, and costly fruit and vegetables from the Vinegar Factory. Some rich women love to cook, and can bore you with recipes they clipped from Food and Wine. But my mother, whose own snooty mother never taught her to cook, is a throwback to those turn-of-the-twentieth century women who never touched a dishpan but supervised the help as their main job.

  Around 11:00 a.m. Mom opened the door and saw me horizontal on her steel couch that took first prize at the Chicago Furniture Show, crying at the CNN coverage.

  She said, “Come here, honey. I was having a breakfast date at the Stanhope with Pamela Levine.”

  Mom had said “of course” to a rare request by her live-in cook, Angela, to leave Manhattan for her mother’s nursing home in Yonkers. Angela had wanted to check on her mother’s emotional state after such a tragedy. Mom asked Wilson, still handsome and her chauffeur after all these years, to bring along a stash of improvised sandwiches in the Lincoln Town Car in case he and Angela got stuck in traffic.

  “Have you eaten?” Mom asked when her two employees had left with a shopping ba
g full of turkey and romaine baguettes. “The pantry is plenty stocked.”

  It was. I’d peeked in there too; the cabinets were piled high with a designer-mustard collection and assorted preserves from London’s Fortnum & Mason. Does my mother feel worldlier knowing that if the munchies strike, she can make a quince sandwich?

  “What would you like me to fix us?” I asked.

  “Darling, you relax. I’ll cook.” Mom poked around in the stuffed refrigerator, and started in on the first meal I’d ever seen her make. I strolled back to the living room and took it all in, this alien but familiar environment, the apartment I grew up in, forever being redecorated.

  “Come eat!” Mom called and I joined her under my old dining room’s Austrian chandelier. I’m not quite sure what my mother’s September 11 meal was meant to be. She’d boiled unsnapped green beans until they were soggy and spooned them on the plate without draining them enough. She steamed strips of expensive beef until they were dead gray. Garnishing it all off was an uncooked baby eggplant cut into fat slices.

  “I’m a little rusty.”

  I swallowed another chunk of the flavorless meat. “It’s really okay. It’s just nice to eat with you.”

  It was. The end of the world loomed outside, but it felt good to have her taking care of me. It felt good to have that short but obviously heartfelt e-mail from Dad saying how concerned he was. Most days I feel as if I’m on the rim of a carousel that goes around and around and I’m never fully joining in the thrill. But for a moment, with New York in physical and emotional chaos, I got a taste of what it would be like to have grown up with doting parents. Then the horror of the greater circumstance hit me again, and I vomited in the master bathroom with the built-in spa.

  I’m still goosey when I reach the buzzer for Bettina’s ground-floor office in her swanky brownstone.

  I chew up a third of my exorbitantly priced therapy time telling her about my unsettling BBC encounter. I take a breath and Bettina hands me a glass. “Try my lemonade. A very famous chef who’s my client gave the recipe to me.”

  “Very good,” I say after a polite sip.

  “So, shall we begin our work?”

  After a few leading questions about the week that was, I explain that the one man I thought was interested in me was Steve Meyers of the Food Channel, and indeed he called, but I see now his only interest in me is for a seder segment. And I’m certain Jared S. is all about the same crap. “That’s all I am to them,” I say, “a woman with a colorful ancestor and a lot of industry connections. What’s most laughable is that Jake wants me to follow through with this asinine seder business, pretend we’re a functioning family, and even make up family members if we have to. He claims the business is in dire straits.” I look up, eager for sympathy. I’m sure that came out sounding awfully whiny, but I’ve shielded Vondra and Jake from my self-absorption, and Bettina is being paid good money to listen.

  Instead of calming me, Bettina is reproaching me. “Your cousin is absolutely right. You need to help the family if the business is jeopardized. From all you’ve said these past months, Jake and you are each other’s lifelines.”

  “My family will be exposed as freaks.”

  “Isn’t everyone worried that their family is on the outskirts of respectability? How are you freaks?”

  Hasn’t she been listening for a year? “Everything about us is freaky. From little to big. Let’s have my mom talk about her new bathroom spigots from Germany. That’s what she spent her last two conversations with me talking about.”

  “She’s a smart woman, you’ve said that yourself. I’m sure she has more sense of what a live special needs than you’re giving her credit for.”

  “Or hey, how about I get my confused dad back in town so he can tell us who he’s dating. Michael or Michaela?”

  “I think this is a larger issue for you that we may need a series of sessions on. If it turns out your father smokes bloke from time to time, does that make him a freak?”

  “What?” I snort. “Smokes bloke?”

  Bettina smirks. “That’s an Aussie expression.”

  “A colorful one,” I concede with the smallest of smiles.

  “Right, we’re talking lightheartedly now. Easier to work with. Give me an example of what hurt you when you were young. Keep it little, love. If you stay with little it will be easier to talk about big.”

  I have to think. “Try games,” I finally say. “Every family played games with their kids, right? Trouble. Operation. Mousetrap. Life. My parents never once played a board game with me.”

  “Heather, I find that hard to believe.”

  “Well, Mom did get a big kick out of her version of ‘This Little Piggy,’ but that wasn’t a board game—”

  “How did it go?”

  The corners of my mouth turn up a bit. “This little piggy went to Bloomie’s, this little piggy went to Lord & Taylor, this little piggy went to Bergdorf’s, this little piggy went to Saks. But this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way to Mays—Mays was a department store like Kmart that was down on Union Square when I was little.”

  Bettina smiles with newly bleached teeth. (From my last two fees?) “That’s quite funny.”

  “It is,” I accept.

  “My parents never played board games with me, we played make-believe games,” Bettina says.

  “But at least your parents played with you,” I say in that aggrieved voice you get when reliving the lesser moments of a life. So much for lighthearted. “My parents forgot I was a child. I never saw one Disney movie, not one! That’s kind of freakish, don’t you think?” At this point I completely lose it and sob.

  “Heather, we’ve done a lot of personal work, and I’ll say it again—I think it’s the right time to tackle your bigger family issues. If you never confront them you’ll never be free of this sadness you carry around. Why don’t you confront them once and for all instead of sticking your head in the sand?”

  “You mean in the matzo meal,” I joke wearily through my tears.

  “If it’s a lousy family reunion, so what? It’s a family reunion. Some progress will be made just by having everyone sit down at the same table.”

  I take a breath and pull myself together before I speak. “But assuming we could get everyone there, which is itself a laugh, what if everything blows up in our face on camera? And where do I even start?”

  Bettina slams her right hand down on her clipboard. “Call your mother. The natural start.”

  “I guess I could do that tomorrow morning.”

  “Where will you be, at your office or the factory?”

  “Tomorrow? Work. I need to catch up.”

  “Don’t be surprised if I call you to get you off your bum!”

  SIX

  The Parent Trap

  When I open my office door Vondra is standing by the window and chatting up a French film-festival director on her red cell phone. I have never seen Vondra Adams without well-applied lipstick and sultry eye shadow. She’s wearing skintight black jeans and a low-cut black bodysuit that reveals significantly more cleavage than should be possible on a yoga body almost exclusively fed fruits, vegetables and tofu.

  “Bonsoir,” Vondra says as she clicks off her phone. She sees my eyebrows rise half an inch when I get the full frontal view. “Water padding. You like?”

  “Definitely vavoom. But I have a feeling I’m not the one you’re advertising for.” No use bringing my personal baggage to work with me. I am determined to be chipper. “Did I miss much yesterday? Sorry to overload you this week.”

  “Family obligations. I understand. Anyhow, the only thing going on businesswise is a fax from our international rep. We sold the Riker’s Island film to Finland and Norway. Three thousand dollars between the two of them, nothing to write home about, but enough to pay the rent for a month and a half. And also some kook keeps faxing us about showing our film in his festival, which he says is world-class.”

  “Why do you say he’s a kook?”
/>   “The festival’s at his house. The Third Annual Fred Diamond Festival of American Cinema.”

  I snort. “One of us should go, just for the cocktail-party story.”

  “Yeah, you first. Oh, we also have a new intern from the City as School starting Monday. His name is Roswell…” She pauses to look at the paperwork and adds, “Birch.”

  “What’s ‘City as School’?”

  “It’s a citywide New York program that allows high-school seniors to gain real-world experience before they leave school. The administrator called me to see if we could place this kid since she had read in a profile of us that I went to Stuyvesant High School, where Roswell goes. He’d expressed an interest in filmmaking.”

  “High school? Wouldn’t someone from NYU or Columbia be better?”

  “We needed the extra hands and I thought, how stupid could he be if he passed that Stuyvesant entrance examination?”

  “I’ll trust you on that one.”

  “The administrator—her name is Jacinta—is dropping by later to speed up our paperwork. But I have much bigger news on the personal front, so get your damn coat off already and let me tell you.”

  “Go on.” I drape my powder-blue quilted jacket on the IKEA coatrack that the previous tenant left in the office.

  “I met a fabulous man. We had one incredible date together and I’m seeing him again tonight.”

  “Aha, now I get the bra.”

  “I’m pulling out all stops. I have a feeling that this may be the one.”

  “What’s so special?” I wait for her answer while she signs for a FedEx package. The deliveryman gives Vondra a very broad smile. I may be a lost cause, but I’ve always known Vondra would hook up with her version of Mr. Right, however anachronistic that sounds. With her body, brains and spark, she can afford to be choosy.

  “He’s refined, adventurous and unfuckingbelievably handsome,” she says after the FedEx guy leaves.

  “Sense of humor?”

  Vondra thinks. “Well, to be fair, I don’t know him that well yet. But did I tell you he has the coolest job? He’s a diplomat.”